5 Ways Employee Advocacy Can Boost Your Marketing Strategy

Motivated and engaged employees are your greatest assets. They believe in your product and they have a full understanding of the company culture and vision.

Did you know that they can contribute to your marketing strategy by sharing brand-related and informative content on social media? A research conducted by Hinge Research Institute and Social Media Today shows that 31% of fast-growing companies have set up an Employee Advocacy program. So, let’s have a look at the key marketing benefits of this tactic.

1. Growing The Brand’s Organic Visibility

Employees, especially the motivated ones, can become golden assets when it comes to social media marketing. When cumulated, their social networks are usually impressively larger than the company’s. Thus, the reach of the content they share is obviously higher.

Think about it: most of employees are active on several social media channels, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. with hundreds of friends or followers on each of those channels. You can now estimate the potential reach of the brand-related content when it is shared by employees!

2. Building Trust in Your Brand

It’s all about trust! Indeed, trust is turning into the secret ingredient of a successful product or service marketing strategy. And here’s the reason why: customers tend to look for product reviews or recommendations they are interested in before finalizing their purchase, whether it’s on search engines, social media, forums or blogs.

This could be explained by a phenomenon called social proof that means one is more likely to trust and interact with someone that they feel is similar to them. It is easier to engage with an employee than with a brand. Indeed, the interaction is perceived as more authentic. According to Nielsen, only 33% of buyers trust brands while 90% of customers trust recommendations from their peers.

Employee Advocacy can reassure customers, especially new ones, about the brand. It is more natural to trust authentic content published by a moral person than doing so with a corporate message. When employees share industry, company and work-related content, they become credible and reliable in the eye of their potential prospects and customers. This leads us to the next point on influencer marketing.

3. Mobilizing Influencers

What would happen if you would integrate influencer marketing with your marketing strategy? Well, if done right, it would lead to a success in terms of image and brand awareness.

In our digital era, influencers have a voice consumers listen to. Actually, Employee Advocacy is a form of influencer marketing. Employees are the ambassadors of the company because they generate engagement, they interact with industry experts, with clients and with other key actors in their ecosystem. It’s quite essential to note that 70.6% think that ambassadors are the most efficient actors in an influencer marketing strategy.

4. Humanizing and Personalizing Corporate Messages

Building a one-to-one relationship with your clients is crucial to your business success. Indeed, your clients want to interact with people. Employee Advocacy is a great way to achieve that.

If you think about it, the same content will be shared by several employees. However, each of those posts will have a unique tone, a slightly different message, and it will show a new point of view. It’s the employee’s personal touch. And believe it or not, this little detail can make a huge difference, especially in the social media era we are in today. People tend to be more reluctant to commercial content and ads promoted on social media.

5. Improving Your Brand Image

When done right, Employee Advocacy has a positive impact on employee engagement in terms of happiness, retention, and productivity. Engaged employees are more likely to become active ambassadors on social media, what has direct positive impacts on the brand image.

Who does contribute the most to your brand image? Mainly your clients and your employees. With Employee Advocacy, businesses can encourage their workforce to share content on social media and interact with customers.

However, it is crucial to work on the quality of the content shared by employees. They contribute to the brand image when they share or comment company-related content on social media. Thus, companies are encouraged to provide their employees with a user-friendly solution that makes it easy to find and share relevant content on social media. It is also crucial to organize training sessions and to share analytics with employees so they can measure their influence on social media.

Providing employees with the right tools and sharing guidelines with them will help you develop a successful Employee Advocacy program. It will also turn this initiative into a marketing strategy that enhances brand image, brand awareness and engagement.